Page 29 of Guess Again
Cherryview, Wisconsin Thursday, July 24, 2025
ETHAN SAT AT THE DESK IN THE SMALL OFFICE OF HIS HOME.
THE surface was cluttered with the Callie Jones case.
Since his visit to warehouse #9 in Menomonee Valley, Ethan had zeroed in on Callie’s cell phone records from the original investigation, which consisted of pages and pages of calls the girl had made the summer she disappeared.
Callie’s phone had been recovered from North Point Pier on Lake Okoboji, where her boat had been found secured to the dock.
Callie had taken her parents’ boat out to The Crest to attend a party the night she disappeared.
No one had seen her after she left the island.
The boat had been discovered Sunday morning at North Point Pier, along with Callie’s phone and the girl’s blood at the end of the dock.
Pete Kramer and his team had dug deeply through Callie’s phone, doing the grunt work years before and painstakingly identifying nearly every incoming and outgoing call and text message.
There was only one number from that summer that had gone unidentified and could not be registered to a user.
That number had been linked back to a prepaid, disposable phone that had never been found.
Pete Kramer and his team had gone to the effort of tracking down the serial number of that phone, and then found the bar-code to determine the make and model—a Samsung disposable phone that had been purchased at a gas station in Cherryview.
Pete had used the Wisconsin Department of Justice databank and DCI forensic techs to determine the date the phone had been purchased, and then pulled security footage from the gas station on the day of the purchase.
The grainy video showed Callie Jones walking to the register and paying cash for the phone.
What Callie had done with the phone, and who she had given it to, was a glaring hole in Pete Kramer’s original investigation.
But now, ten years later, Ethan sat in his home staring at the Samsung phone Callie had purchased, confirmed by the serial number. And Francis Bernard had led him to it.
As Ethan thumbed through the pages chronicling the calls made from Callie’s phone, he saw that nearly every one had pinged a tower in Cherryview.
On a hunch, he decided to log every call or text Callie had made that pinged a tower outside a twenty-mile radius of Cherryview, Wisconsin.
During the year that started January 1, 2015, and ended July 18, 2015—the last day anyone saw Callie Jones—Ethan found thirty pings outside the Cherryview radius.
He pulled a clean sheet of paper in front of him and listed the cities where the cell towers were located.
All were in Wisconsin, with many located between Madison and Milwaukee. A cluster was in northern Minnesota, which was explained by a fishing trip Callie had taken with her sister and father in early July. Only one, Ethan noted as he reviewed the list, had originated in Chicago. It was made on Thursday, July 16, 2015 at 10:00 a.m. Two days before she disappeared. The number Callie had called was the prepaid Samsung.
Ethan dialed Pete Kramer’s number.
He picked up on the first ring.
“Hey, I’m reviewing Callie Jones’s phone records, and I think I came across something.
What can you tell me about the unidentified number that showed up in Callie’s caller log?”
“We looked pretty hard at the phone,”
Pete said.
“Our tech guys were able to identify that calls and texts were made between the two numbers—Callie’s and the burner phone.”
“I don’t see any transcripts of the text messages.”
“That’s because we were never able to recover them.
My guys believe Callie used an encrypted texting app that automatically deleted the text threads after she sent them.
They found footprints of text threads but nothing more.
It was a dead end.
Why? You find something?”
“Maybe.
I see a single call from Callie’s phone to the burner number that pinged a Chicago cell tower on July 16.”
“Yeah, we saw that, too,”
Pete said, reciting the case from memory.
“The call was made from Callie’s phone to the burner phone, but it never led anywhere.
The burner was a bust, we never found it.”
Ethan wasn’t ready to mention that the prepaid phone the DCI had been unable to locate ten years ago was now resting on his desk.
Mostly because he wasn’t prepared to explain to his old partner how he’d stumbled across it.
But Ethan was curious what Callie Jones was doing in Chicago two days before she went missing.
“The girl’s phone,”
Ethan said.
“Is it still in evidence?”
“I’m sure it is.”
“Any chance I can get my hands on it?”
“E, you got something?”
“I’m not sure, but I need the girl’s phone to find out.”